Mileto da tradizioni cittadine a genealogie ioniche (Hecat., FGrHist 1 F 300)

Hdt. II 143 (Hecat., FGrHist 1 F 300) says that Hecataeus made his family genealogy and found fifteen ancestors and a god as the sixteenth; the historian tells about the reaction of the Egyptian priests, who made their genealogy by counting the statues of the priests in the temple: they enumerate 345 ancestors without finding a god or a hero. This contribution argues that the fifteen ancestors in the Hecataeus’ literary genealogy – as the fourteen ancestors in the epigraphic genealogy of Heropytus at Chios – aim to cover roughly the time span from the beginning of the history of the Ionian city to the time of the genealogist: the hero who Herodotus mentions is clearly Neleus. The genealogy of Hecataeus – like that of Heropytus – is built according to the Ionian tradition. In the oldest polis traditions the priority attested a right or a role: a family legitimized its position in the community attempting to ascribe to itself an ancestry as old as possible (a primordial figure or a hero celebrated by the epos). The Ionian genealogies start from Neleus: the «account of common origin» of the Ionians tells that under Neleus they came to their territory and founded their cities. That is the elaboration of a shared past in which all the Ionians must identify, without competing in priority and blood, but instead self-ascribing to the same times and ancestors of the «common tale». Hence Hecataeus compresses the ancestry of his family in the time span that a Ionian pedigree tree provided him.